The Death of the Heart - Elizabeth Bowen [83]
V
Darling Portia,
What a marvellous idea! Of course I should love to come, but shall I be able to get away? But if they expect me I really must have a try. No, I don't mind if I sleep in their lumber room. I suppose I shall hear Dickie snore through the wall? We are still making fine hay with Thomas out of the office, and if Mr. Rattisbone doesn't have one of his phases I do think that I should be able to nip off. Another thing is, though, that I seem to have filled up my next three week-ends. Next week-end, I think, on the whole, should be the easiest for me to get out of—if I make enemies, you must stand by me. If I do come, I will come on that morning train you said. I shall be able to let you know on Friday. I'm so sorry to leave it as late as that.
I do hope all your dashing friends will like me. I shall be so shy. Well, I must stop, you sweet: I've had three late nights and I do feel like death. Directly you go away I start to go to the bad, which shows how important you are to me. But I simply have to be out. You know I hate my room.
I had just a line from Anna. She sounds quite pleased with everything. Well, I'll let you know. I do hope I can come.
All my best love.
Eddie.
This rather tormenting letter came on Wednesday morning—by which time Mrs. Heccomb was already busy beautifying the lumber room. She had fallen in quite serenely with the idea of this visit, for Eddie had, somehow, been represented to her as an old family friend of Anna's and Thomas's, coming down to see how Portia was getting on. This seemed to her most fitting. What she could not get herself happily reconciled to was, that any friend of the Quaynes should sleep in her lumber room. But Daphne and Dickie refused to make any offer, and they kept a close eye on her every evening to see that she did not move out of her own room. The more briskly Daphne asserted that the lumber room would not kill Eddie, the more Mrs. Heccomb's forehead wrinkled up with concern. She could only buy more matting, and move in her Sheraton looking-glass. She also moved in her prie-dieu to act as a bedside table, and improvised a red paper frill for the light. She borrowed an eiderdown from Cecil's mother. Portia watched these preparations with growing misgivings; they made her dread more and more that Eddie might not come. She felt a great threatening hill of possible disappointment rising daily over the household's head—for even Daphne was not indifferent, and Dickie had taken note that they must expect a guest. In vain, she implored Mrs. Heccomb to remember that Eddie's plans for the week-end hung on a thread.
She was also alarmed when she found what a stalwart preconception of Eddie Mrs. Heccomb had—she clearly saw him as a Major Brutt. Daphne knew otherwise: at any mention of Eddie a piglike knowing look would come into Daphne's eyes. Daphne's own affairs were not going too well, for Mr. Bursely, in spite of the good beginning, had not been seen since Saturday—Daphne now took a low view of Wallace and Charlie with their civilian ways.
Major Brutt's second puzzle had come on Wednesday morning, by the same post as Eddie's letter, and Portia worked at the puzzle at a table in the sun porch, with a diligence that helped to steady her nerves. It soon promised to represent a magnificent air display. That week was very sunny—her eyes dazzled as she fitted piece into piece, and a gull's shadow flashing over the puzzle would make her suddenly look up. The planes massing against an ultramarine sky began each to take a different symbolic form, and as she assembled the spectators she came to look for a threat or promise in each upturned face. One evening Dickie offered to help her: the table was moved in to under a lamp, and Dickie completed an ambulance she had dreaded to tackle.
She got a postcard from Anna, a short letter from Thomas, a long letter from Lilian, whose sorrows seemed far away.
She went into town every morning with Mrs. Heccomb. Mrs. Heccomb pressed her to drop in on Daphne at Smoots'. The first call was alarming—in the upstairs library heating drew out a gluey smell from the books; Daphne's nostrils wore a permanent crinkle. In all senses, literature was in bad odour here. The sun slanted its stuffy motes straight on to Daphne's cross curled head; in the dusk at the back of the library Daphne's colleague crouched at a table, reading. Contempt for reading as an occupation was implicit in the way Daphne knitted, stopped knitting to buff her nails, and knitted again, impatiently hiking by the long strand towards her her ball of coral wool. The twitch of the coral ball did not disturb the apathy of the library cat